Louis Proyect wrote:
> >I probably should resist getting dragged into this but: 1) I am
> >[split]
> >Doug
>
> Doug, Mine can (and I am sure will) speak for herself, but it occurs to me
> to pose the question what a "humane liberal" would be doing taking a job to
> head up the World Bank to begin with? The World Health Organization I can
> understand, but the World Bank?
As Lou knows, I and Yoshie have been conducting more or less open warfare with Doug Henwood on a number of issues on lbo-talk for nearly two years. It is a conflict that has sometimes exploded into open flame war. No doubt it will again in the future.
But Doug Henwood is not a fool and he is not an apologist for capitalism. He knows perfectly well, for example, that physical capital exists and is of fundamental importance -- and Mine's posts on this illustrate either a real inability to read *or* a delusion that procaiming one's marxist purity on mailists is a revolutionary act. And in this post, Lou, you are being a perfect asshole, letting your personal feud with Doug corrupt your intelligence. You pose "the question what a "humane liberal" would be doing taking a job to head up the World Bank to begin with?" What in the fuck do you think a humane liberal is? That is *exactly* where one would expect to find one. Whatever Doug's political errors (and he shares with you and Mark Jones the very serious political error of voluntarism) being soft on humane liberals is not one of them and he has made quite clear his belief that politics so described are toothless. The enemy is the World Bank -- and by your silly little personal feud with Doug you are blurring the attack on that enemy.
And you are not doing this maillist any good by encouraging Mine's incredible misreadings of Doug, for which there is no possible excuse (nor is ther any for her serious distortions of Yoshie's relationship to "libertarianism") and if you were not blinded (I hope temporarily) by personal animosity in this case that would be clear to you. Were any other name but "Doug Henwood" attached to his presentation to the marxism 2000 conference you would have been the first to recognize that it is a fine savaging of the concept of a "new economy," as all the *marxists* as well as the "post-marxists" in the audience recognized.
Doug seriously underestimates the strength of the capitalism in general and of u.s. capital in particular. That leads him to his error of believing there are alternative routes to socialism. But you make the same basic error, and you share with Doug the delusion (perhaps fatal delusion) that the defeats of the left are to be ascribed primarily to errors of the left. (Mao's essay on where do correct ideas come from should have be appled equally to incorrect ideas, which do not fall from heaven either.) Thus neither of you is able to ask the simple question, Why, in the decade following the 1973 slump, did so many committed and intelligent people follow Avakian into RCP or follow Laclau and Mouffe into radical democracy?
I suspect neither of you has ever thought of putting Avakian and Laclau into the same sentence?! Try it. There has been some discussion lately about the demonization of Milosevic, which led to a few remarks in some post (I forget whose) on whether the whole process of demonization wasn't wrong. Perhaps the easy demonization of Avakian and of Laclau and Mouffe has obscurred more important matters. And perhaps your joint demonization of each other is just as unwise.
The amount of damage your personal quarrel is doing the movement is in precise relation to the importance of the marxism and the lbo lists. If they are trivial, quarrel away. Otherwise, stop and think.
Carrol
P.S. U.S. capital will destroy the human species before it allows itself to be voted out of power. It is either violent socialist revolution or Rosa's barbarianism. If insurrection is permanently impossible, then the only question facing us is how to best limp through to our personal deaths.
P.S. 2. Oil Shortages, economic disaster, and global waming will never produce the forces necessary for insurrection. If we don't have time to build a revolutionary force without that appeal, then the only question facing us is how to best limp through to our personal deaths.